I had a truly ridiculous theatre experience yesterday.
Shiny LA Downtown. Mark Taper Forum. The theatre at its best and…
..how should I put it? 🤔
A modern play about stupidity and misery with the elements of political humour and porn.* Plus, with mostly old people in the audience.
Insanely real half-rooms, perfect N-dimensional sound experience… It is well-produced (it’s Hollywood for God’s sake) but still hard to believe in.
50+ years old man is going through a tough divorce and kind of tries to find his soulmate… well.. not really a soulmate… but someone who can comfortably live with and do ‘fun’ stuff. It results with the hero doing total sht with his 2.5 relationships.
The married couple, the hero’s friends, gave him either some silly advice (like, here’s the woman, she’s so perfect for you) or not even a piece of advice (‘you do what you do’)… It’s all extremely helpful as you may sense. As a result, the middle-aged depressed character gets not one, but two women. The first one was provided by the friends. The second one was a total stranger who met the hero at the bar one day and then suddenly came to him pregnant asking for a place to live because her druggie boyfriend dumped her. They kinda started hanging out in trio… The friends-provided lady was kind of sweety and said the hero that he had to help the poor run-away girl. (What a drama!) He offered the run-away girl help. He insisted on the help.
Then they kissed.
Then they had sex.
And it was the second time when I saw an old man’s dick.
The first appearance of that great feature was on the first act when the hero had sex with the friends-provided lady. It was their first date. (How wonderful!)
I feel sorry for all those people…
The play is definitely weird. It’s written by Tracy Letts after the events of #metoo movement. I guess, the idea was to show strong and independent women who dump the hero. The hero broke up with the friends-provided lady for the sake of happiness with the run-away lady (actually, a girl as she was in her 20s). In the end, the girl did run away to her druggie boyfriend (oh, how ironic!). Poor dude had nothing to do but to come back to the friend-provided lady but she dumped him (oh, no way!).
I guess the ladies had to shine bright and STRONG. To dispell my doubts, the women stated something like ‘I can do it on my own’, ‘I don’t need your help’ and ‘I am a person’.
[Sorry, but there is no better response to #metoo than it was in… Southpark.]
Yes, the women are so cool and shiny than they go to bed with a depressed oldie on the first date. Cool…
There was a discussion after the performance too. I expected to see the cast, the director, the play writer… But I saw a curator asking questions to the audience. It was an experience of a school literature class but for a play with a plot as clear as LA sky in summer!
I accept the theatre of deep psychological experience. I did not see any of that at Linda Vista yesterday. In the end, a comedy is the most difficult genre ever.
🙂 If you want to be that confused and experience ‘SENSATIONALLY ACTED’ play at its fullest, you can do it at Mark Taper Forum in DTLA until the 17th of February.
*Holy heck, I saw AN OLD DICK for the first time in my life. Eww… 🙈 I’m too young for that… somebody should have told me! I remember the shock of seeing the demonstration of the physical act on the stage of Oxford theatre… excuse me, but those people did mind their manners. And it was nowhere near the one I observed yesterday.
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